Copasetic Flow

 KO6BTY and I took Project TouCans up to Mt. Davidson this morning. We did not activate the summit. We did manager a QSO with K6EL before the keyer may have given out. (We're going to test it here in a bit.) What we did find out is that the imuto charging brick we're using can tune between two really loud radio stations that are presumably both broadcasting from nearby Sutro Tower. With the power cable plugged into the 100 Watt jack, we received the local sports station. With it plugged into the 60 Watt jack, we get music instead. Update: We did in fact lose a keyer chip. When I tried to rub-start the radio, I accidentally touched the power wire to the keyer chip programming input terminal. After that, the keyer chip was forever convinced that I was holding down the programming button. I had planned for this kind of thing—it's happened before—so I had a replacement on hand back at the house.

 A fairly gentle hike led to a QSO with Japan at 3/4 watts, and a brand new SOTA ham radio activation. Summit:  W7N/WP-147  8340 Getting there Welp, there's no public transit avilaable to this particular summit, so the gang and I drove.  If you're not from the area, and you're able to, plug in the cooridnates of the peak and let Google plot a route for you. You'll also want to download the offline Google maps for the area; there's plenty of phone signal at the summit, but there are places on the drive in where there’s none at all. Google Maps led us through several forks in the gravel/dirt road to a location just to the south of the summit.  If you stop where we did, you may notice a set of tire tracks that lead most of the way up to the mountain’s central ridge. They make for a nice easy start to the hike. When the tire tracks peter out, you can navigate the rest of the way up on a variety of game trails. My path deposited me on a picturesque saddle in the ridg...

 In addition to some interesting ham radio happenings, there were fighter jets and hummingbirds. Stand-alone cameras rock! Park: Mt. Davidson in San Francisco:  W6/NC-423 I used the best-for-me-for-early-morning-transit route I mentioned in my last SOTA report  for this summit. I also used my Google Pixel phone to record the actual slope of the hike up from the bus stop. You might remember that I took umbrage that Google claimed the route was almost flat.  Today, I measured it using the 'degrees off kilter' display on my cell phone. The slope is a wopping 12 degrees. Hardly flat. Here's what the world looks like if you take a picture of the 'mostly flat' sidewalk: Radio Details and Gear: I saw that the  qrper.com  trip reports include a gear list. I hadn't ever thought about it before, so I figured I try it out. Interesting, or no? Radio: A green board Rockmite 20. You can get the red board kit at  QRPMe . Antenna: 12 gauge wire cut to a half-wave dipo...

 There was a lot going on this morning. Propagation was almost exclusively to the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains; I successfully used an atlatl to launch the attena twine; and the RockMite reached Japan!.  There were so many mosquitos up there this morning, I managed to get a rain coat on farily soon, but I'm so going to pay for that. The recent rains left a couple of largeish puddles near my usual antenna spot, and the mosquitos took adavantage. Park: Mt. Davidson  W6/NC-423 I finally lighted on what I believe is the easiest public transit route for an early morning arrival at the summit—keep in mind, the park opens at 5:00 AM PST. Catch the  43  at Geneva and Mission, or you're favorite stop. Ride to Juanita—yup, that is the first step of the gang's and my original route. Here's the change: wiggle through the streets to Dalewood, and make your entire ascent there. In aboout 10 minutes, you'll be at the trailhead next to the 36 bus stop. This is much fas...

The automated QSO mapping project can now handle p2p POTA and s2s SOTA QSOs. It does this, for the moment, by accepting two optional fields at the end of each QSO line in the .csv file the app uses for input. Those two fields contain the latitude and longitude of the SOTA/POTA station. When they are found, they are used immediately , rather than the geocoded information for the QSO receiving station. Here's the feature summed up in video This is the SOTA log the map is based on. I indicated which QSOs were S2S in my notes Here's the map with s2s locations denoted: and here are a few examples that show the summit to summit feature in action. The map to the summit is overlayed with the map to the home station: AA7OY and KT0A

This summit's a nice, fairly easy hike to a flat mountaintop with six foot tall cedars that worked just fine for suspending a 20 meter halfwave dipole ham radio antenna. Summit: El Cerro de Los Lunas  W5N/SL-015 This was a fun climb just a few miles off the interstate, I-25. I'd forgotten how gorgeous New Mexico rain clouds are, and how much advance notice they give. Where there are little whisps coming down out of the grey cloud, it's raining. It sprinkled on me just a bit, luckily after I was done playing radios. Getting there: The trail mentioned on the SOTA site for the peak—route A specifically—is a big improvement over any other routes I found, (alltrails for example), to the summit. There were a few issues though. There’s no longer a gate at the end of the road. There is a dip in the barbed wire though, and I was able to easily step over. I was unable to find the ‘main’ trail mentioned in the route’ on the SOTA site. I was, however, able to find a small arroyo that I...

 Finally! Finally the antenna went up with very little fuss or muss. The key seems to be to have a new roll of twine. The little extra bit of heft gets it over the branch. Also! New York! Park: Mt. Davidson W6/NC-423 I did the easy-to-me route of taking the 43 to Forrester and Monterrey. From there, Google Maps plots out a walk to the mountain that looks like so: and vertically speaking was far from the worst hike in the world: Radio Details: As I mentioned, the antenna went right up this time. The radio ran like the little champ that it is. Unlike when I was there over the weekend, I did not couple into the antenna. I could stand up, or sit down, and no matter. I did notice that the radio picks up sixty-cycle hum above a certain height (about 10 feet?) Below that height, the band is quieter, but also the radiation angle goes up. I found this out by taking time to experiment with antenna height and see that the Utah SDR finally picked up the RockMite in the morning again. It's bee...

 I continued my recent trend of ham radio in atomospheric rivers at the San Bruno Mountain summit. It was my first SOTA. Park: San Bruno Mountain State Park W6/CC-072 , K-1196 I climbed the mountain from the South San Francisco Side. I took BART to South San Francisco station, and then took the free blue circulator bus from there to the Chestnut and Hillside stop. The climb was very reasonable. There was a well worn trail the entire way. It would have been a bit more pleasant without the rain, but then in March and early April here in San Francisco, I wouldn't have done much of anything if I'd waited for the rain to stop. Radio Details: The antenna setup worked amazingly well! With the lack of trees, and the driving, nonstop rain storm going on, I just laid the antenna across two bushes, held the radio in my hand, and hoped for the best. And it worked!!!    QSO/ RBN spot map: Happenings of Interest   It was wet! I didn't expect to make any QSOs with the bush-bor...

More on this later, but on the kids and my first SOTA activation of Mt. Davidson here in San Francisco, we made only one QSO... To Japan!!!!! The Rockmite was operating on 14058.4 MHz as always, powered by 8 AA batteries. The view from the radio: